November 19, 2019 • 53 mins
About 5,300 years ago a Copper Age shepherd was murdered. He just happened to die in a place where his body was so well preserved that gave researchers an actual shot at determining the course of his final day on Earth.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Cuckoo Seattle. We're coming to see you. Yes, and your
little horn announcement is one of my favorite things that
you do because I know it means we're going to
do a live show, and in this case, we're going
to the great state of Washington, the greatest city in
the United States, Seattle, at the greatest theater in the world.
(00:22):
The more the more we're going back. It's like our
home away from home in Seattle. We're going to be
there Thursday, January, and tickets are already on sale and
they're going like like uh Washington hotcakes, which is fast. Yeah,
they're going like chew car cherries. And you know what,
you want to save the few bucks, I think you
can even go to the box office there buy them
(00:43):
without those internet fees. Yes, Or if you don't care
and you just want to buy them on the internet,
you can go to s y s K live dot
com and follow the links there and it will take
you right to the beautiful ticket site. And also, f
y I, if you go to buy tickets in person,
you want to go to the box office of the
Paramount Theater downtown, not the more the Paramount. We'll see
(01:04):
you guys in January. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, and
there's guest producer Josh over there, which makes this Stuff
you Should Know all inclusive, and guest ghost host Chuck.
(01:29):
Are you a ghost? Now? Did you die? No? I
just thought if there was two josh is in here,
I feel a little left out. Oh I see and
ganged up on. Yeah, I just I had no clever
way to say it. Ghost host, You're right about that.
My mouth is working today, my brain, that's all right.
It's been a long week already. It's only Tuesday, really, right,
is it just me? No, it's been a long week.
(01:50):
I mean today's like I know, I don't want to complain.
Never mind, everything's great. Hey, let me ask you something.
Does OATSI have a noom loud or not? Yes, it's
it's okay. It rhymes with tutsie. I saw someone put it.
I think are good friends at Smithsonian Magazine. It's there's
a bit of an R in there. Yeah. I like,
let's see alright, like Tutsie roll the dead Mummy. Let's see.
(02:16):
This is a good one. This is exciting. I've been
wanting to do one on this one too. I had to.
But in what spurned spurned or spurred? Spurned is where
you say get away and spurs like go ahead? Okay, nice,
Yeah that makes sense because you're using your spurs spurred. Sure,
I'm sure that's where that comes from. Surely, Okay, we
chuck just blew my mind? Uh what spurred this was there?
(02:40):
Let's see made some news recently because they managed to
trace his last like day and a half, really like
in the past few days even, Yeah, and about fifty
three years ago. He had the same thoughts that we
had when we started this podcast. He's like, it's only
Tuesday and this has been a long night already, a long, deadly,
bloody week. Yeah. I've been interested in this since I
(03:01):
saw the facial reconstruction photos. I was like, let's he
was Jack Palance Chris Christofferson? Is that? Okay dude? A
little bit of both. No, It's like they said, Mr Christofferson,
please come in so we can. Well, now that I
think about it, Christofferson and Jack Palance are have some similarities.
If you put a beard on Jack Palance, really yeah, sure,
(03:24):
squinty eyes. Yeah, I guess sound this sh face. Yeah,
I guess you could see both. Christofferson, Man, what a legend. Remember, yeah,
look there's Chris Christofferson kidding. That's let's see. Yeah, I
mean it's me and Bobby McGee right there. Exactly did
you see that Ken Burns documentary? Now I didn't not yet.
(03:47):
You haven't yet. Still No, I went to buy it
the other day and I just have not yet. So good.
He's gonna buy that stuff, right, yeah, all right. I
just didn't know if there was a work around and
you're like, oh, no, dude, here's what you do. Um,
I mean, I'll buy it. It's like t Bucks. Oh wow,
PBS gives it away for free. What do you got
some PBS connection? No, it was on PBS for a while.
(04:08):
Oh do you have cable or something? See, I don't
have I don't even think you have to have cable.
Oh you mean like, um, like you just stream? Yes,
you're you're up the creek. I thought you meant, now,
you don't have to have cable to get PBS. You
just like help people in the world and just beams
under your eyelids. You know what I was thinking? You
(04:28):
have to stand there and hold like a coat hanger
a certain way in your TV. In the other hand,
you can get PBS. I'm gonna buy it though it
looks great, why not? It is good, and I would
say I would, I would say it's worth roughly sixty
it's pretty good. But anyway, Chris christoffers and figures big
into one of the episode like it's not worth more
than forty five, go ahead and pay right because it
(04:49):
goes to Kim Burns hairdresser. That's right, and that's a
quite a collection of brushes that person has to maintain.
But Chris Christofferson has interviewed like today and thing he
looks exactly like let's see now. Well, I try to
get him on movie Crush because he played the City Winery,
which is like attached to our building basically, So I
will try and get people from over there on the
(05:11):
basis of like are you gonna do? Was walk over there?
Called the parking lot right his His manager emailed me
back and said, and this should hearten you as well,
said I'm actually it's stuff you should know. Fan the
manager and said, but you know what, um, he doesn't
really do interviews anymore. So maybe I just got the
the easy, the easy paths, but man, I really wanted
(05:33):
that one to come through to dude in this office.
That would have been pretty special. But I'm no Kin Burns.
No who is kin Burns? Yeah that's true. All right,
let's talk. Should we take a break, Let's go back,
chuck a little bit, let's get in the way back machine.
It's been a little while. Okay, we're gonna go back,
(06:00):
and we even know exactly when we're going back to
one pm on September. Whoa one. I'm I'm in college.
It's a salad days. I'm wearing a Flavor Flavor clock
around my neck. I was a sophomore in high school. Yeah,
(06:21):
that's all I have to say about that. I never
wore the Flavor Flavor clock. But trying to let that
be well, I should have. I was not cool enough,
but I was listening to Apocalypse. You know what I'm saying.
You shouldn't have admitted that you didn't work, But no
one believe that. You know, I'm not that cool. You know.
Aaron Cooper made a pretty awesome one of my favorite
ones of all time. It was us as Public Enemy,
(06:43):
and I think I'm flavor flavor in it. But you
look like Chuck D. And it's cool. It's a cool
photo shop of us. I tried to get Chuck D
on Movie Crushed too. Did he play the city Winery? No,
but he lives in Atlanta. I didn't know that and
at least part time, Boy did he say he did
say anything because the management company at email said we
don't manage him anymore. So it was just a dead end.
(07:05):
I got you the Chuck the If you're listening Pont
City Market, let's come, let's talk about your favorite movie.
Right and also shout out to Chris Christofferson's manager. That's right,
of course. Alright, boy, we're gonna have to go back
and ed it all this happened. No, it's one thirty
pm e septemb and we are hiking with Erica and
(07:25):
Helmut Simon there German. But we are hiking in the
oats all Alps in Italy. Yes, between Italy and Austria,
like right on the border, very close to the border.
Um and on this peak the uh. The Simons decided
that as they were descending that they would take a
short cut, and the shortcut took him through this past
(07:46):
pastor crevasse and in this little shallow crevasse, they said, oh,
there's a there's a dead body. There's a corpse. And
you were like what I was because we were there too,
right yeah, And I said it's right time, boy, right exactly. Um, yeah,
that's great. So the thing is is they could they
(08:07):
could see it was I could ever like they could
see the corpses, back, back of the head, arm hanging out, um.
And they just thought, well, we heard that there was
a hiker that was recently killed, and that's probably who
that is. We'll take a couple of pictures and go
down and tell somebody who owns like the nearest lodge.
And on the way down, you and I are going like,
that was not a hiker that was recently killed. Even
(08:29):
I knew that, Like, did you see that guy? He
was super old. He was a mummy. The Simons are crazy,
and the Simon's were not crazy, but I'm sure they
were saying the same thing. They were just out of
your shot, right. So they they some people went up
and I think within a day or two they went
up to try to get this dead hiker who they
(08:49):
thought was a dead hiker out and they did a
terrible job with it. They used ski poles to chip
away at the ice. They used an ice hammer to
chip away at the ice. Um damaged the body. But
they think, well, it's just like some hiker or whatever.
It will be fine. Put him in a wooden cast
it um. And this article makes it sound like he
(09:12):
like the whole world or everybody who knew about this body.
I just thought it was a modern hiker for you know,
a while, until the body came down the mountains. That's
not the case. One of the things that when they
were getting this body out the accidentally excavated was a
copper headed axe, and word got out that there was
(09:33):
an axe with this body, and that is really weird
copper with like a wooden shaft and everything was clearly
a very very very old um axe. And so pretty
quickly they realized that they were onto something here for sure.
And what they found out was this body hi frozen body.
One of my favorite Simpsons lines ever five thousand years old.
(09:57):
That's the same like, same little bit as he goes
moon pie a not a Abes buddy. What's his name?
Oh man, it will become me later, I'll say it.
People are screaming. I can picture him now, Oh what
(10:20):
is it? I want to say, like Chauncey or Chalmers?
Is not that very similar to that? Honestly? All right,
I'm gonna keep going. So they get this body out
and UM removed it on September, sealed it up, like
you said, flew it out of town in a wooden
coffin to Ennsbruck, the Institute of Forensic Medicine. And there
(10:42):
was an archaeologist named Conrad Spindler there who said, uh,
this body is at least four thousand years old, at
the very least. What's abes friends name, Jasper Beard? Of course,
so they nicknamed the Utsi because of the region of
the all Alps. Very cute little name it is. Other
(11:02):
people call him frozen Fritz. Really yeah, I like, let's
see way more so. Um. In pretty short order they
realized that what they had just excavated in the roughest
possible manner and accidentally come upon was the corpse of
a fifty three hundred year old body. Yes, And when
(11:26):
I said the guy said it was four thousand years old?
He he said that was the initial Like he's at
least this old, right, But it turns out that after
further study, they figured out he was actually fifty years
old and that he lived in the Copper Age, which
was a relatively brief period in human history, but a
really important one um between the Neolithic Age at the
(11:47):
end of the Neolithic Age when the first farmers started
to appear, and the Bronze Age, when the first what
we consider society and civilization in history began. And we
know very little about this, and what hikers had discovered
was a snapshot of life during that time because let's see,
(12:07):
appeared to have just died where he fell where he died,
or died where he fell. Yeah, it was almost there
um and leaving his his belongings with him, and it
wasn't he wasn't like a great revered figure. He wasn't buried,
he wasn't prepared. He was kept intact for fifty years
on this glacier. Yeah, that was the biggest deal because
(12:28):
they have mummies, and they have older mummies, but like
you said, it's their organs are removed. They're filled with
you know, embalming chemicals and things they used at the
time for preservation for the afterlife and all this. So
this was a really big deal. To find this body
just really really scarily well preserved. And when we say
(12:51):
well preserved, it doesn't look like Chris Christofferson but not anymore.
The organs were there and like didn't the red blood
cells have still intact. Yeah, it's the oldest intact blood
sample ever taken. Um Let's sees was so and the
fact that he wasn't buried provides a snapshot. It wasn't ritualized.
(13:14):
It was this guy was just living his life and
he died and happened to be preserved perfectly. So his
belongings were preserved along with them and things that are
organic and typically typically um decay long before years comes
and goes. So his clothing made of like different types
of leather was preserved. His his coat or cape made
(13:37):
of woven grasses was preserved. It was a really cool
when you look at the shoes and the bear skin
had and bear skin hat was another one. His tool
kit was preserved. All of the stuff that we had
like like just kind of little hints and traces and
glimpses of from different like burial cashes or just happened
(13:58):
to find some artifact or whatever. This was like a
straight up polaroid picture of life in the Coppers. Yeah,
it was almost like someone stumbled upon a Museum of
Natural History display, but it was real, right, you know,
well put chuck. You know who would have loved that analogy?
Chris Christophers. It's not gonna say either Jasper or Arty.
(14:19):
And I don't mean would have in the fact that
he's dead, I mean would have had he heard it.
I agree, he's never going to hear this. You never know.
I'm like using reverse. They called his manager right now,
Well do you might as well. Willie Nelson will never
listen to these either, neither World Dolly Parton. We want
all the country legends listening. Ronnie millsap will never hear this.
(14:39):
Was okay, not with us though, because he doesn't listen
to stuff you should know and never will. So apparently
where where Artsy actually fell was pretty lucky because it
was in a very shallow crevasse and the fact that
that was uh kind of walled up on both sides
of him kept him. If he was just out in
(15:00):
the open, the freeze thought cycle over the years would
have washed everything away and ripped him apart. And uh,
it didn't happen because he kind of fell in this
crevasse um, all five ft two hundred and thirty four
pounds of him, which is a hundred and fifty eight
centimeters And that's right. He had brown eyes. Apparently at
(15:20):
five two was even a little short for the time,
but he was ripped. Yeah, he was pretty sturdy, uh,
you know, in his mid forties, like we said, and
really strong legs. And you know, kind of the fun
thing about this is the archaeological forensics of trying to
piece together like what was he doing, how did he die? What?
(15:43):
We'll get to all that, but just the fact that,
like he had big legs. They were like this guy,
he's probably go hurder. He's walking up and down these
mountains all the time. Look at those calves. He looked
like that guy from that one Liberty Mutual commercial. I
don't know, what do you mean, It doesn't matter, like
ten people this laft. What else did he had? He
had a dagger, he had that axe you're talking about.
(16:06):
The dagger, had a wicker sheath, he had um a backpack.
He had a leather pouch. Yeah. The backpack, by the way,
we'll never know how it worked because it got destroyed
by the people who went and dug him out of
the ice. He had some rudimentary snowshoes. He had a belt.
He had had a belt that matched his cape, right, yeah,
oh man, and we'll talk about that. But apparently they
(16:28):
think that was on purpose. Yes, that he was a
bit of a fashionista. Um. He had a couple of
like vessels that were lined with um maple leaves that
he used to carry embers from place to place so
he wouldn't have to start a fire again. And all
the stuff. You're like, I'm cool a flint dagger, cool
copper x oh some members, Yeah, I do too. But
(16:49):
I can see people out there being like, uh, talk
about math or something. Right. The thing is is like
all this stuff that seems kind of boring and superficial
has been so thoroughly study that it's actually been used
to paint a larger picture. Like we understand the copper
age in Europe way better than we did before he
was discovered just from finding this, the few things that
(17:12):
he died with and him himself. He also interestingly had
sixty one tattoos all over his body. I've been waiting
for this day. What you said tattoos correctly? Oh, you
mean the tattoos, so uh yeah, and they were they
(17:33):
covered him from head to toe in different parts, and
they didn't use needles back then obviously, but they would
rub or cut the skin open and then rub charcoal inside,
and they're all They mapped him out in two thousand
fifteen and organized them into nineteen groups, and they are basically,
you know, like maybe three identical lines, short lines like
(17:53):
an inch long, or like a cross, not a spiritual
religious cross, but you know, like a plus sign, yeah,
or like a Chinese character that has some inspirational association
perseverance or something had a lower back tattoo of a
thorny branch um. But yeah, they map these all out,
(18:15):
and for a while they thought, and some people still think,
because they were largely found around the joints and along
his back um, and he had back problems, and they
he basically was marked up where he hurt, it looks like,
and they thought it might have been either acuput puncture
points to mark or it might have been the acupuncture
(18:35):
treatment itself, right, but it does. They do think that
it had something to do with acupuncture, which in and
of itself was a big revelation because they thought up
to that point that acupuncture had been invented two thousand
years after, let see, and way further eastern in Asia, right,
But now they think that may not have been the
case because they found um a new cluster of tattoos
(18:59):
on his chest that they didn't formally recognize, and they
were like, there are no acupuncture points there, and he
didn't have any injuries there. So now they're they didn't
throw it out with the bathwater. But there are people
now they're saying like, we don't know if that's true
or not. No, Okay, so I'm really glad you said that.
Everything that we know about Letsie, aside from the fact
(19:20):
that he is dead, that we have a pretty good
idea of when he lived, probably was height, weight, was
stuff like that. Everything else is interpretation. So you have
to remember that interpretation super educated and usually UM displaying
the current understanding of history or interpretation of history or events,
(19:42):
but um, it is still interpretation. That's part of archaeology
and anthropology and history, especially when you're talking about prehistory.
This is he lived during a time before anybody wrote
anything down or recorded anything, which makes it prehistoric. But
you just bear that in mind that everything we're talking about,
and every a thing you go read about OTSI is
very much described in absolute terms, but it is our
(20:06):
picture and image of him. How he lived, how he
died has really shaped and shifted over the years since
he was discovered, and it still is. It's still malleable.
Nothing is definitive. Nothing said in ice. All right, let's
take a break. It was a bad joke. We'll talk
about Urtsey's health, right for this. Was he healthy? I
(20:49):
mean he was. No. He was a person of age
in his mid forties of a time where at that
age he's going to be pretty beat up. Yeah, he
wasn't unhealthy and like the modern sense where he's like
deliberately wrecking his health because he's eating too much junk
food or something like you know me. Yeah, but he
was unhealthy in the way that a person would be
(21:09):
unhealthy from living close to the land at a time
before medicine had really developed. Yeah, exactly, no doctors, no dentists.
So as you would imagine, he had gum disease, heart disease,
lime disease, gallbladder stones, hardened arteries, gall stones. Yeah, the
disorders so nice, we named it twice, right, He had
(21:31):
a whipworm parasite in his gut. He had h pylori
in his gut um. And all of this is to say,
like you said, he was probably a pretty normal dude
of mid forties of the time. Uh, he was. They
couldn't find his stomach for a long time. It's amazing
how much of the stuff like it was found over
the years, Like this tattoo. This new tattoo was just
(21:53):
found a few years ago after like many many years
of study. His birthmark that looks like Abraham Lincoln eluded
people for decades, but they couldn't even find his stomach
and they found it, like, oh, here it is twenty
years later. They found it wedged up between his ribs
and his lungs. Yeah. Then they found it because they
noticed tia gall stones. So they basically traced a path
(22:15):
from the gall bladder to the stomach and said, there
it is. We found it. And they were really happy
they found it because when they started dissected or take
samples from it, they found that it was full. Yeah.
He died like within an hour or so of eating
his last meal and hadn't digested it. He had food
in his in his colon. Uh, he had food and
his intestines. He had a turtle head peeking out. That's awesome.
(22:41):
What his last meal was dried ibex and deer meat
with ink horn wheat, Yes, and slow plums. I don't
know why that wasn't mentioned. Can get that same meal
in served you by a guy with a waxed mustache
and like some sort of arm band, an armed guard. So, yeah,
(23:02):
an armed guarter. That's that's it, isn't it. Yeah, that's it.
Um So he they think some sort of like fatty
cured meat, kind of like a bacon cured bacon today.
And the iron iron i corn wheat was from bread.
And he also ate slow plums. Got okay, slow plums Yeah,
that they make slow gin from. Oh really, which I've
(23:22):
never had, have you? That's s l o e right
yeah right. It's like it's supposedly a very tart, kind
of bitterish plum, but it was it's like load of vitamins.
I've never had it. I remember it seemed like an
old person drink was a slow gin fizz, like an
old person who's like a hundred fifty year olds old. Yes.
When when I lived in Arizona, there were all the
(23:43):
snowbirds are down there. They drink like slow gin fizz. Really,
I've never been present when somebody ordered a slow gim fizz. Yeah,
I would like to try one. Sure, try one. Okay, Josh,
get a couple of slogan fizzics. Make it a double.
I guarantee. There's a bar in this dumb building that
has lgent businessman. Sure, you know, with armed guards. Um,
(24:04):
can I keep? The armed guard comes with the drink.
So let's talk a little bit more about the copper Age.
I guess um he had, well, what we'll save his
injuries for a minute. Here, we'll talk a bit a
little about his lifestyle in the copper Age. Like you said,
he was, as demonstrated by his meals, he lived a
(24:26):
pretty like farming pleasant life down there, it seems like,
but not one without conflict, you know. Sure based on
his meals, well, based on his meals, he lived a
farming type lifestyle. But based on injuries we're going to
talk about it seems like that, you know, he he
had some enemies. So from from what I saw, and
(24:49):
I mean we used a lot of different articles, but
National Geographic is very well represented. And here live science
history dot Com the BBC. I came across something from
the Pen Pennsylvania, the Penn Museum or U Penn Museum.
I think they have a magazine called Expedition that was
pretty awesome. It had a pretty great thing, And I
(25:10):
saw a couple of things from um historians that wrote
up basically descriptions of let's see and thought co which
is this is a surprising great resource. Yeah have you
ever noticed Yes, yeah, so um in In one of these,
I saw that it was kind of put like he
he lived as a farmer and enjoyed like the fruits
(25:36):
of village life too, so things like cheese and processed
grains and cereals, so bread and stuff like that, and
the um the idea is that he didn't know how
to bake bread or make cheese. He he was part
of a villager or society where somebody knew how to
bake bread and somebody knew how to make changes, so
the professions were starting to emerge. But that he also
(25:58):
was pastoral and that like he he herded sheep and
that's probably what he did most of it most of
the time. And then he also lived very close to
the earth the land as well, like his last meal
was wild game ibex and deer and slow plums that
he probably plucked himself. So he was kind of like
(26:19):
this transitional human from from the hunter gatherer passed into
the agrarian, agriculture based future that spread out just ahead
of him. Yeah, Like just ahead of him were like
real deal Italians out there, bacon baguetts, well that's French, Yeah,
what I mean Italian bread? Yeah, yeah, in Italy they
(26:42):
just call it bread, that's right. Uh. They I mentioned
earlier that his clothes matched and they do think, and
of course again this is all speculation, but these garments
were pretty refined, even when you look at him now,
like he had these fur skin leggings that were held
up by spenders by Alexander McQueen. Oh man, I wouldn't
(27:04):
saw that. I know. That was amazing. So good. Um,
and a great documentary on him too, that's good and sad. Uh.
The they talk about the color of the animal skin, Zoe,
the contrasting colors, they think, we're actually matched, like elaborately,
and he had, like, like you said, a sense of style,
like you know, is that possible? Yeah, But I mean
(27:29):
it seems like a lot to extrapolate that his coat
and his belt matched, and so they were like, hey,
he had a real personal identity, whereas in it could
have been just like that's the materials that he had
on hand that fit. That's possible. But I think what
they're what they would assert is that um, it has
enough panache that the chances of it just being random
(27:51):
are very unlikely or less likely than it being you know,
asserting his sense of fashion and well and he was Italian,
that's right, So you know, Italians and their fashion go
hand in hand. Everyone who's been to Millino knows that.
Or Fenze. Remember when I was touring Europe as a youth,
my friend and I laughing at the Italian guys and
(28:14):
the hostels were like the nineteen year old dudes were
so put together and like would spend so much time
in the mirror wearing the cologne and getting their hair
just perfect, and we were just disgusting humans. And they
got the girls. So it turns out that they were
onto something a little bit of extraffer really does and
the big hair. Yeah, they were great guys. So we
(28:34):
met some cool Italian dudes. One of the other things too, though,
that the fact that he clearly was involved in a village.
They think that he was associated with a particular village
to the south, in a valley near you know, the mountains. Um.
It was things like bread and cheese that they think
they found in his body. Um, but also the fact
(28:56):
that he did not he obviously didn't know how to
make his own tools. Somebody else had. Um. He probably
did not know how to weave the cape he was wearing.
Somebody else had done that. Yeah, they're all they all
had their specialties that. Yeah, the tattoos, he couldn't have
put some of them on his own body. He probably
went to see a medical practition or to do that. So, Yeah,
(29:19):
this is at a point when specialists and and specialized
professions are starting to emerge. It's a really cool time. Yeah,
and this is these are the things that we've learned from,
you know, that we've gleaned from the stuff that we
found with him. I think it's just astoundingly fascinating. Yeah,
it's really cool. This is a really interesting period I
think of human development. It's also called, by the way, um,
(29:41):
the copper age or the chocolthic like copper age to
chalcolithic just kind of coughs out of the mouth in it. Yeah,
so let's talk a little bit about what might have
happened to see and how he found himself dead on
that mountain, because there quite a theories over the years,
(30:01):
and like you said, even this week they have some
more leads. But he was wounded. He had a really
bad wound on his right hand. They found out he
was right handed too, so this is a big deal
between his thumb and his forefinger there. That area went
all the way down to the bone. But it looked
like it had healed up a little bit. Um, So
it probably happened they said, within a few days of
(30:23):
when he died, but it was healing. But it was
a big injury, like we said, because he was right handed,
and um, but it's not the kind of thing that
that killed him, Like he didn't bleed out from that
or anything like that. No, So um, it makes you think,
well I did kill him then, right, Well, they think
that might have been from a fight. Perhaps that wound
that has been almost universally agreed upon from the outset
(30:48):
right that he probably didn't inflict that wound himself. That
it seems to have been a defensive wound. Right. There's
a guy named Alexander Horne, who is an inspector with
the Munich Police, and so we should give just a
little background for a second. When he was found, he
was taken into Germany down the mountain into Austria Innsbruck.
Austria and the Germans were heavily involved as well as
(31:09):
the Austrians and the Italians were less involved, and that's
where he kind of stayed for the first few years,
I think about a decade or less after he was discovered,
and then eventually it was transferred to Italy. The Italian side, yeah,
because they were like, he's a founder on our side. Yeah,
like just to barely I think. Also, I don't know
(31:29):
if this contributed to or if it came later, but
he does seem to have been linked to the Italian side,
where like you said, he was an Italian. So he
was transferred to Italy and when they when they took
custody of them man, they pulled out all the stops.
They put him up in Bolzano, Italy, near about I
think like thirty miles or something from where he was found. Uh.
(31:51):
They built a museum specifically for him, an institute built
around studying him, and they proceeded to study him more
than any other mummy has ever been studied, probably any
other body than has ever been studying in the history
of the world. Um and have just turned out paper
after paper after paper based on their findings from them.
(32:13):
Um so. But at first, some of the ideas that
we have about let's seeing what happened to him come
from the earliest interpretations posed by the Germans and the
Austrians when they had custody of its right, which weren't
necessarily right, as it turns out, no, but some may
have been. But my ultimate point was, everybody says from
(32:33):
the outset that the wound in his hand was a
defensive wound that came from close combat with somebody else.
That's right. For a while they thought there was an
Austrian archaeologist named Conrad Spindler that I mentioned earlier that
they sort of recreated the scene. And their contention early
on was like, man that acts is leaning up against
(32:54):
the rock, it's propped up there, like we think everything
is literally frozen in time from how it was is.
And I think that's one of the things that they've
later refuted, right, And they said that it looks like
things might have moved around something. Yeah, they think that
the um what would you call it, the site I
guess from the freeze thaw cycle just kind of distributed,
(33:15):
redistributed this stuff. Yeah, which you know, it's still all valid,
but it not necessarily it was not necessarily exactly as
it was at his moment of death. Um. They did
find his hat though, off of his head, as if
it just like kind of fell off of his head,
which might have been true. Right, So some of those
early stuff. They also found what they thought were fractured
(33:37):
ribs that had not healed. Right, So the earliest picture
was this like they treated it like this is a
dead body mystery. Where did this dead body come from?
How did he die? Yeah? But well quickly though, they
also found pollen in his gut that they thought came
from an autumn plant, So they were like, he died
in the fall, right. Okay, so that's the full setup
(33:57):
of the bad information. So the first idea, and I
think it was Spindler who came up with the disaster theory,
wasn't Conrad. Spindler said, Okay, here's what happened to Let's see,
he came down from the mountain, probably hurting some sheep
or goats, went down to his village, uh, and got
(34:19):
in an altercation with somebody cut his hand. You're looking
at my wife, right, that kind of thing. That's nice, um,
and he fled or oh and part part of the
altercation also resulted in some cracked ribs and either fled
or left escaped up the mountain again where he became
exhausted from his cracked ribs and his cut hand, and
(34:43):
uh he laid down or fell into this little shallow
crevasse and died of exposure to hypothermia. That was the
disaster theory. And that was that, you know, I mean
they had that for a few years, and somebody came
along and said, I don't think that's right. That's right, um,
because they found out some of the things, like the
site had melted some and then things were in different
(35:06):
positions they originally thought. Probably they examined the ribs again
and said they were actually not fractured before he died. Yeah,
that they were just a little bent. Yeah from like
after his death, probably from the push of ice, the
pressure from ice fusing on him again exactly. That'll that'll
crack your ribs in a second or bend your ribs.
The big one, though, was what they found in the
(35:27):
X ray in two thousand one, Right, you know what
they found? Should we take a break, all right, we'll
discover what they found right after this? What do they find, Chuck?
(35:56):
They found a freaking arrow head lodged in his shoulder,
back shoulder. That was a verbatim quote from the press conference.
This was a big deal. They missed it for ten years,
they missed the thing, and they found it. Uh yeah,
it was just a regular X ray And they said,
wait a minute, that looks denser than bone. What is that.
(36:19):
It's a triangle. It's a triangle. And it was a
thirteen millimeter gash along a major artery in his chest.
And they're like, he bled to death up there. Yeah,
they said, there's no way he would have survived. This
is unhealed. This this is finally what killed him. So
this disaster theory that he got in an altercation but
ultimately died of exposure hypothermia UM was replaced by the
(36:42):
murder theory, which is very similar, but there's some important
nuances in differences. One, so the cracked rib thing, just
throw that away. It was a red herring UM. But
the altercation is still the same. He comes down the mountain,
he gets in a fight of some sort, go back
up the mountain with his cut hand, and while he's
(37:04):
hanging out, maybe tending to his wound, maybe trying to
figure out what to do next. That's my arrow impression
message for you. So yeah, right in the back, in
the back. From a distance, they think due to the
penetration from the arrowhead from about thirty that is it
(37:24):
is a good shot. Because it was a kill shot
from thirty and fifty ft. That's a that's a ways, um.
I can't quite put it into an easy analogy, but
that's a long that's a long way. Um. And the
fact that it was in the back, he never saw
it coming and it would have killed him pretty quickly
was a punk move, is what it was. It was.
Here's the thing. Because his possessions were left intact um
(37:49):
and because he had that defensive wound, they think that
this was the result of his death, as murder was
the result of a personal conflict. There was no theft
involved or anything like that, because his copper acts alone
would have been pretty valuable at the time that somebody
would have taken it had they killed him for something
like robbery. Yeah, so this was a vendetta, yes, or
(38:11):
at least a personal fight that happened that day, yeah,
or maybe a long standing for you. There's no way
to tell here. Here we reached the point where the
historians and the archaeologists are like, we really can't say,
but here's some ideas for me. It's either the person
who he fought came back for revenge. I think, and
(38:31):
this is a total guest, but I was trained in history,
so I'm allowed to do this. He was trained in history, Yeah,
it was. I studied history in college. That's what they
call it. They're like, just how you do it? Train
history camp? Right? Um? He he was successful in that
hand to hand combat and killed the other person. Whether
it was offensive or defensive. I like to think it
(38:54):
was defensive. He didn't have a choice. Um. But the
person's family came back and killed him up on the mountain. Gotcha.
That's the current idea. Well, not that last part that
it was his family, but what I said leading up
to that, everything about that, um, everything else about that.
I'm really sorry, Chris Christopherson. Um, that's the current idea
(39:15):
of what happened. Let I think so you're not going
with my jealous lover theory. No, okay, no, I'm not
all right. I think it was a woman with that arrow.
You think the woman a woman shot him. Yeah, jealous lover.
I think he was stepping out and he was like
holding up his hands like baby, baby, it wouldn't me.
And she slices him with the her implement of choice
(39:39):
and then dices him with the arrow. And then he's like,
this is getting too serious. You're crazy, and so he
heads up the mountains and she's like, I'll show you crazy.
She turns into close, she goes and forges an arrow,
and then in that time it took her to forage
that arrow from hardened molten you know, l flint hirt shirt.
(40:03):
He's up that hill a little bit and she's like,
no problem, watch this right in the back. I like
that one too. Alright. I'm going with family, family, because
I mean, you know the rule, can't trust family, trust family.
So um, speaking of that churt, uh, he did not
have um, he didn't have blanks. Yeah, so this is
(40:27):
evidence that he didn't know how to create his own tools.
Somebody applicate these tools, which apparently were sort of on
their last legs. Yeah, that was another thing too, So
he did not have what he needed. Like imagine if
you had um, if you had like a a tool
an no, a knife, okay, and it's made of flint,
(40:49):
and you use it over and over and over again,
it's gonna get worn down and eventually it's gonna get
so worn down that you just can't use it anymore.
This is essentially the state of his arrowheads and his
knife and some of his others, his stone tools in particular,
that he was not in a position to defend himself
with his own tools because he'd used them up. And
(41:10):
I wonder if the if he's not making these in
the village, if they're like ertsies, you know he's have
you guys noticed he's on the way out, Like, we're
not gonna be making any more tools for Ertsie. Yeah,
I can think we don't have many. He'll just make
do with what he's got, it said, but he owes
me money, So should we talk about moss. This was
(41:33):
astounding to me that this happened in the last few days,
because did you pick this out before this happened or
was it serendifically? This is what I saw that made
me say it's time, Okay, I got you. So researchers
found uh these moth spores uh that were inside of him,
that he had ingested and just on him and around him. Um,
(41:53):
seventy percent of the seventy five species of these mosses
and liverwarts were not local. And they basically said, there's
no way these would have been on the side of
the mountain if not for him, right like a bird
couldn't have transported it this far or something like that, like,
let's he brought these up here. And so in doing
that and in tracing like these mosses and spores and everything,
(42:16):
they have a big clue. They've been able to retrace
his steps that last basically thirty three hours of his life,
the last day and a half, and it was not
a great day and a half for him. He had
his hand wound. By now by the time we're coming
in here, he's already got his hand wound. Uh. It's
got to be smarting. And it's a real problem for
him too, because even if he could make tools, he
(42:38):
would have been really troubled to do anything because he
was right handed, and that's where his wound almost down
to the bone was was in his right hand, so
that's a big problem for him right there. Yeah, So
what they found in is lower colon, which is would
have been the last I'm sorry, the oldest stuff that
he had eaten that has not yet been the turtle
(42:59):
head not yet, not turtle headed yet or I guess
currently turtle headed. Um, we're pine and spruce pollen, so
they said, And it's kind of neat. That's what I
love about this, like historical forensics, like, oh, well, we
know what was in his body, and we know where
that stuff is. It's not at certain altitudes. It was
a high altitude for us around feet and they know
(43:23):
because of where it was in his body. This is
thirty three hours before he died. But the middle tractor
was colon. That's where all the secrets are. In the colon,
you know, had pollen from hop hornbeam and that's stuff
from lower altitudes. It's from lower altitude. But also it
grows only in the spring and summer. It decays very quickly,
(43:47):
so it's not something that you would preserve and keep
for the fall or the winter. Throw out the autumn theory.
So they say he definitely died in the summer, right
and I guess that means that he probably descended maybe
all the way to the bottom of the valley within
twelve hours, maybe nine to twelve hours of his death,
(44:07):
and then all the way back up again right where
he was found dead. And they figured all this out.
They retraced all this just from those spores and mosses.
They think, maybe so he he's down in the valley
to begin with, or in the village, gets that hand wound,
flees up to the tree line. Um, and then they think,
because he's like the little lady always needs a few
days to cool off, right, Oh, you're gonna get some
(44:30):
email for that one. Um. I retract my right by
the way. Uh so, and then he goes back down,
they think to get some mosses because they have anni
bacterial properties. Yeah, you can also raped meat in it
apparently too, I guess keep it or whatever. But also
they may he may have wrapped his hand in it
or something as well, or maybe maybe then he goes
(44:52):
back up to the tree too, above the tree line
where he dies at about ten feet along the way.
He had that last meal of I box and deer
and bread and slow plums. Pretty good meal, not bad.
I wonder if he was panicked, if he knew like,
I'm in a bad way because of this cut on
(45:12):
my hand, and my tools and arrowheads are not in
good shape. I don't know, because it's interesting you only
know that stuff from seeing it at that point in history,
Like it would have been like, boy, I've seen that
kind of wounded before on too, and he did not
last long. But if you thought somebody was coming after you,
and you knew that your arrowhead was useless and your
(45:35):
knife was like dull and you're your stab in hand
was cut to the bone, you probably wouldn't have had
to have seen that before to be like, uh, probably
so well, he was in full retreat from what it
looks like, right, Yeah, and that's why he was going
up that mountain. That's that's that's what most people guess. Yeah,
so he was probably scared, yeah, which is sad, But
(45:55):
that's how we spent this last day and a half
kind of on the run up and down the mountain,
which is pretty impressive that he was able to make.
You know, he went up and down the mountain. Don't
forget he was wearing moccas and stuff with grass and
he was old for the time and he had gingervitis. Uh.
Kind of a neat thing is they have found, um,
they found some weird markers on his male sex chromosomes
(46:17):
and they've actually traced some genetic relatives at least nineteen
people living today, Yeah in Austria, not married but related
to Yeah. Pretty neat. Yeah, I think so too. So check.
There's another theory that says, hey, you know, your whole
murder theory it's bs. Maybe the murder part is correct,
but he was murdered ritually. This is an a vendetta
(46:39):
or anything like that. Let's see was buried, right, they
think that this was a ritual burial on top of
a mountain. Um, but he you know, it's not the
kind of Maybe they just want a group that removed
the organs and did that stuff, right. Yeah, So the
premise of the burial theory, called the social theory, is
(47:00):
that he's not a snapshot of everyday life. That they
didn't that he would have been so heavily laden with
all of this stuff because we didn't even say he
he had a bow and arrow, over knife, a hatchet. Um,
he was wearing moccasins with grass and they're kind of
like seriously, that's the best they could do at this
time for the hiking a mountain. That's the shoes you wore, Like,
those aren't mountain hiking shoes at any point in history. Um.
(47:24):
And the fact that um, the shaft of the arrow
was removed, I think they point to is an example
of the idea that he was um buried, that he
was killed ritually and buried in this So they think
the killing was a ritual killing too, because sacrificial killing. Yeah, oh,
(47:46):
I didn't get that part. And the other thing is
they're saying, like this stuff, these fancy Alexander McQueen leggings
that he wore that were basically the predecessor of later hosen,
there's some pretty nice stuff for a simple like sheep
herd her is it to be wearing? That's what this
is what the social theory people are saying. They're they're like,
we think this guy was actually kind of important and
(48:08):
that he was buried here um as a sign a symbol.
And what they found or what they point to, is
that there's stella like monoliths that were carved in the
late coper Age a thousand or two thousand years after
Utsie because he was born at the beginning of the
coper age that our depictions of somebody dressed a lot
(48:30):
like Utsie and they think that these are like heroes
and legends, ancestors, and they're saying, this guy's wearing what
these people were carving images of a thousand years later,
maybe he was kind of important, and maybe this has
also had some ornamentation too, didn't he Yeah, like a
marble bead, which you know could mean something or could not.
But the fact that he had so much stuff with
(48:51):
him does kind of support the idea that maybe it
was a burial and then to send him into the
afterlife with all the things he would need exactly. And
then the other one is no one's ever explained how
he was so well preserved. That apparently being frozen by
ice doesn't doesn't cut it. Yeah, that that other people
have been found who died far later and we're in
(49:15):
way worse states of decay than as he was, but
they found no like chemical preservation evidence or anything. No,
And admittedly at both sides, if if either one of
them are being honest, they will say we don't know
how he was this well preserved. Quite a mystery still
to this day. As much as we know about him,
he is still a mystery. He's our love and mystery man.
(49:38):
That's right. If you want to know more about let's see.
Go type O t Z I and your favorite search
bar and it will bring up some fascinating stuff. And
since I said that son for listener man, I'm gonna
call this the Accidental iron Man. Hey, guys, a big
fan for a long time. I accidentally did my first
(49:58):
iron Man in July. And you might think, how in
the world would that happen? I was thinking exactly. Then
here's how that happens. I've been doing triathlons since two
thousand fifteen always planned on doing an iron Man at
one point or at some point, my plan was to
do a half iron manen do the full thing. In
twenty nineteen, I wanted to do the Iron Man like Placids,
(50:20):
since it's reasonably close and as a lake swim as
opposed to a river or in ocean swim. Um. That's
a hard race to get into, though, because it sells
out so fast. I got an email tell me registration
was open, and in my excitement I misread it and
thought it was for the half, so I signed up
and realized after the fact that it was the entire
hundred and forty point six race and not the seventy
(50:42):
point three Triathlons don't do refunds, so I paid my
eight hundred dollar plus entry fee and couldn't get it back.
I could have deferred for a year, but it's decided
just to go for it. And I finished the race
in fifteen hours, two minutes and forty three seconds. And
that is from John Patanyac and an email John back,
and it's like, you want to give me a couple
(51:03):
of little tidbits here for listener mail, and he said sure,
and he wrote back and he said, one thing I
can say is it really takes over your personal life.
At my peak, I was training twenty hours a week.
And he said that is literally just pool, bike or running.
He said, doesn't count travel to and from the gym,
cooking meals, prepping equipment. He said, it's literally like a
part time job. And he said the race was a
(51:25):
lot of fun. He said, the Lake Placid course goes
through the old Olympic structures from the nineteen Olympics, and uh,
you finish at the finish line and the speed skating
oval that's Nate. Yeah, it's pretty cool a sineficture. It's
like urban exploration iron right, uh, And he said. One
of the cool things they do if you're first timer,
as you wear an orange wristband, so all the volunteers
(51:46):
and crowd will give you extra support and it says
I will become one on it. And he said, it
really works. And he said, and finally at the end,
the race is so meaningful to so many people. Everyone
has their own story, but almost nothing is better at
for a year of training then hearing you are iron Man.
When he crossed the finish line, it's awesome. They have
(52:07):
Auzzie singing it. I would, I would? Who else? I
don't know. I guess Deo could. Again. That is John
Patoniac Dio is dead, oh is he? Yeah? Ronnie James
Dio has passed on since when within the last couple
of years. Yeah. One of the coolest tattoos have ever seen.
Somebody got like on their arm, their forearms. I've seen that,
(52:31):
so that when they make like the devil horns or whatever,
it's Ronnie Dio making the devil horns and the person's
fingers his arm becomes Yeah, it's really neat it. I
saw that and I thought, man, that's the coolest tattoo
ever seen. I think it might be. It's pretty Hats
off to Chris Christofferson's manager, who actually is the person
(52:52):
with that? That's right? Uh. If you want to get
in touch with us, like who is that John Patoniac?
Thanks John? If you want to get touch of this,
like John, congratulations too. You can go onto Stuff you
Should Know and check out our social links. You can
also send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeart
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
(53:14):
of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Cuckoo Seattle. We're coming to see you. Yes, and your
little horn announcement is one of my favorite things that
you do because I know it means we're going to
do a live show, and in this case, we're going
to the great state of Washington, the greatest city in
the United States, Seattle, at the greatest theater in the world.
(00:22):
The more the more we're going back. It's like our
home away from home in Seattle. We're going to be
there Thursday, January, and tickets are already on sale and
they're going like like uh Washington hotcakes, which is fast. Yeah,
they're going like chew car cherries. And you know what,
you want to save the few bucks, I think you
can even go to the box office there buy them
(00:43):
without those internet fees. Yes, Or if you don't care
and you just want to buy them on the internet,
you can go to s y s K live dot
com and follow the links there and it will take
you right to the beautiful ticket site. And also, f
y I, if you go to buy tickets in person,
you want to go to the box office of the
Paramount Theater downtown, not the more the Paramount. We'll see
(01:04):
you guys in January. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, and
there's guest producer Josh over there, which makes this Stuff
you Should Know all inclusive, and guest ghost host Chuck.
(01:29):
Are you a ghost? Now? Did you die? No? I
just thought if there was two josh is in here,
I feel a little left out. Oh I see and
ganged up on. Yeah, I just I had no clever
way to say it. Ghost host, You're right about that.
My mouth is working today, my brain, that's all right.
It's been a long week already. It's only Tuesday, really, right,
is it just me? No, it's been a long week.
(01:50):
I mean today's like I know, I don't want to complain.
Never mind, everything's great. Hey, let me ask you something.
Does OATSI have a noom loud or not? Yes, it's
it's okay. It rhymes with tutsie. I saw someone put it.
I think are good friends at Smithsonian Magazine. It's there's
a bit of an R in there. Yeah. I like,
let's see alright, like Tutsie roll the dead Mummy. Let's see.
(02:16):
This is a good one. This is exciting. I've been
wanting to do one on this one too. I had to.
But in what spurned spurned or spurred? Spurned is where
you say get away and spurs like go ahead? Okay, nice,
Yeah that makes sense because you're using your spurs spurred. Sure,
I'm sure that's where that comes from. Surely, Okay, we
chuck just blew my mind? Uh what spurred this was there?
(02:40):
Let's see made some news recently because they managed to
trace his last like day and a half, really like
in the past few days even, Yeah, and about fifty
three years ago. He had the same thoughts that we
had when we started this podcast. He's like, it's only
Tuesday and this has been a long night already, a long, deadly,
bloody week. Yeah. I've been interested in this since I
(03:01):
saw the facial reconstruction photos. I was like, let's he
was Jack Palance Chris Christofferson? Is that? Okay dude? A
little bit of both. No, It's like they said, Mr Christofferson,
please come in so we can. Well, now that I
think about it, Christofferson and Jack Palance are have some similarities.
If you put a beard on Jack Palance, really yeah, sure,
(03:24):
squinty eyes. Yeah, I guess sound this sh face. Yeah,
I guess you could see both. Christofferson, Man, what a legend. Remember, yeah,
look there's Chris Christofferson kidding. That's let's see. Yeah, I
mean it's me and Bobby McGee right there. Exactly did
you see that Ken Burns documentary? Now I didn't not yet.
(03:47):
You haven't yet. Still No, I went to buy it
the other day and I just have not yet. So good.
He's gonna buy that stuff, right, yeah, all right. I
just didn't know if there was a work around and
you're like, oh, no, dude, here's what you do. Um,
I mean, I'll buy it. It's like t Bucks. Oh wow,
PBS gives it away for free. What do you got
some PBS connection? No, it was on PBS for a while.
(04:08):
Oh do you have cable or something? See, I don't
have I don't even think you have to have cable.
Oh you mean like, um, like you just stream? Yes,
you're you're up the creek. I thought you meant, now,
you don't have to have cable to get PBS. You
just like help people in the world and just beams
under your eyelids. You know what I was thinking? You
(04:28):
have to stand there and hold like a coat hanger
a certain way in your TV. In the other hand,
you can get PBS. I'm gonna buy it though it
looks great, why not? It is good, and I would
say I would, I would say it's worth roughly sixty
it's pretty good. But anyway, Chris christoffers and figures big
into one of the episode like it's not worth more
than forty five, go ahead and pay right because it
(04:49):
goes to Kim Burns hairdresser. That's right, and that's a
quite a collection of brushes that person has to maintain.
But Chris Christofferson has interviewed like today and thing he
looks exactly like let's see now. Well, I try to
get him on movie Crush because he played the City Winery,
which is like attached to our building basically, So I
will try and get people from over there on the
(05:11):
basis of like are you gonna do? Was walk over there?
Called the parking lot right his His manager emailed me
back and said, and this should hearten you as well,
said I'm actually it's stuff you should know. Fan the
manager and said, but you know what, um, he doesn't
really do interviews anymore. So maybe I just got the
the easy, the easy paths, but man, I really wanted
(05:33):
that one to come through to dude in this office.
That would have been pretty special. But I'm no Kin Burns.
No who is kin Burns? Yeah that's true. All right,
let's talk. Should we take a break, Let's go back,
chuck a little bit, let's get in the way back machine.
It's been a little while. Okay, we're gonna go back,
(06:00):
and we even know exactly when we're going back to
one pm on September. Whoa one. I'm I'm in college.
It's a salad days. I'm wearing a Flavor Flavor clock
around my neck. I was a sophomore in high school. Yeah,
(06:21):
that's all I have to say about that. I never
wore the Flavor Flavor clock. But trying to let that
be well, I should have. I was not cool enough,
but I was listening to Apocalypse. You know what I'm saying.
You shouldn't have admitted that you didn't work, But no
one believe that. You know, I'm not that cool. You know.
Aaron Cooper made a pretty awesome one of my favorite
ones of all time. It was us as Public Enemy,
(06:43):
and I think I'm flavor flavor in it. But you
look like Chuck D. And it's cool. It's a cool
photo shop of us. I tried to get Chuck D
on Movie Crushed too. Did he play the city Winery? No,
but he lives in Atlanta. I didn't know that and
at least part time, Boy did he say he did
say anything because the management company at email said we
don't manage him anymore. So it was just a dead end.
(07:05):
I got you the Chuck the If you're listening Pont
City Market, let's come, let's talk about your favorite movie.
Right and also shout out to Chris Christofferson's manager. That's right,
of course. Alright, boy, we're gonna have to go back
and ed it all this happened. No, it's one thirty
pm e septemb and we are hiking with Erica and
(07:25):
Helmut Simon there German. But we are hiking in the
oats all Alps in Italy. Yes, between Italy and Austria,
like right on the border, very close to the border.
Um and on this peak the uh. The Simons decided
that as they were descending that they would take a
short cut, and the shortcut took him through this past
(07:46):
pastor crevasse and in this little shallow crevasse, they said, oh,
there's a there's a dead body. There's a corpse. And
you were like what I was because we were there too,
right yeah, And I said it's right time, boy, right exactly. Um, yeah,
that's great. So the thing is is they could they
(08:07):
could see it was I could ever like they could
see the corpses, back, back of the head, arm hanging out, um.
And they just thought, well, we heard that there was
a hiker that was recently killed, and that's probably who
that is. We'll take a couple of pictures and go
down and tell somebody who owns like the nearest lodge.
And on the way down, you and I are going like,
that was not a hiker that was recently killed. Even
(08:29):
I knew that, Like, did you see that guy? He
was super old. He was a mummy. The Simons are crazy,
and the Simon's were not crazy, but I'm sure they
were saying the same thing. They were just out of
your shot, right. So they they some people went up
and I think within a day or two they went
up to try to get this dead hiker who they
(08:49):
thought was a dead hiker out and they did a
terrible job with it. They used ski poles to chip
away at the ice. They used an ice hammer to
chip away at the ice. Um damaged the body. But
they think, well, it's just like some hiker or whatever.
It will be fine. Put him in a wooden cast
it um. And this article makes it sound like he
(09:12):
like the whole world or everybody who knew about this body.
I just thought it was a modern hiker for you know,
a while, until the body came down the mountains. That's
not the case. One of the things that when they
were getting this body out the accidentally excavated was a
copper headed axe, and word got out that there was
(09:33):
an axe with this body, and that is really weird
copper with like a wooden shaft and everything was clearly
a very very very old um axe. And so pretty
quickly they realized that they were onto something here for sure.
And what they found out was this body hi frozen body.
One of my favorite Simpsons lines ever five thousand years old.
(09:57):
That's the same like, same little bit as he goes
moon pie a not a Abes buddy. What's his name?
Oh man, it will become me later, I'll say it.
People are screaming. I can picture him now, Oh what
(10:20):
is it? I want to say, like Chauncey or Chalmers?
Is not that very similar to that? Honestly? All right,
I'm gonna keep going. So they get this body out
and UM removed it on September, sealed it up, like
you said, flew it out of town in a wooden
coffin to Ennsbruck, the Institute of Forensic Medicine. And there
(10:42):
was an archaeologist named Conrad Spindler there who said, uh,
this body is at least four thousand years old, at
the very least. What's abes friends name, Jasper Beard? Of course,
so they nicknamed the Utsi because of the region of
the all Alps. Very cute little name it is. Other
(11:02):
people call him frozen Fritz. Really yeah, I like, let's
see way more so. Um. In pretty short order they
realized that what they had just excavated in the roughest
possible manner and accidentally come upon was the corpse of
a fifty three hundred year old body. Yes, And when
(11:26):
I said the guy said it was four thousand years old?
He he said that was the initial Like he's at
least this old, right, But it turns out that after
further study, they figured out he was actually fifty years
old and that he lived in the Copper Age, which
was a relatively brief period in human history, but a
really important one um between the Neolithic Age at the
(11:47):
end of the Neolithic Age when the first farmers started
to appear, and the Bronze Age, when the first what
we consider society and civilization in history began. And we
know very little about this, and what hikers had discovered
was a snapshot of life during that time because let's see,
(12:07):
appeared to have just died where he fell where he died,
or died where he fell. Yeah, it was almost there
um and leaving his his belongings with him, and it
wasn't he wasn't like a great revered figure. He wasn't buried,
he wasn't prepared. He was kept intact for fifty years
on this glacier. Yeah, that was the biggest deal because
(12:28):
they have mummies, and they have older mummies, but like
you said, it's their organs are removed. They're filled with
you know, embalming chemicals and things they used at the
time for preservation for the afterlife and all this. So
this was a really big deal. To find this body
just really really scarily well preserved. And when we say
(12:51):
well preserved, it doesn't look like Chris Christofferson but not anymore.
The organs were there and like didn't the red blood
cells have still intact. Yeah, it's the oldest intact blood
sample ever taken. Um Let's sees was so and the
fact that he wasn't buried provides a snapshot. It wasn't ritualized.
(13:14):
It was this guy was just living his life and
he died and happened to be preserved perfectly. So his
belongings were preserved along with them and things that are
organic and typically typically um decay long before years comes
and goes. So his clothing made of like different types
of leather was preserved. His his coat or cape made
(13:37):
of woven grasses was preserved. It was a really cool
when you look at the shoes and the bear skin
had and bear skin hat was another one. His tool
kit was preserved. All of the stuff that we had
like like just kind of little hints and traces and
glimpses of from different like burial cashes or just happened
(13:58):
to find some artifact or whatever. This was like a
straight up polaroid picture of life in the Coppers. Yeah,
it was almost like someone stumbled upon a Museum of
Natural History display, but it was real, right, you know,
well put chuck. You know who would have loved that analogy?
Chris Christophers. It's not gonna say either Jasper or Arty.
(14:19):
And I don't mean would have in the fact that
he's dead, I mean would have had he heard it.
I agree, he's never going to hear this. You never know.
I'm like using reverse. They called his manager right now,
Well do you might as well. Willie Nelson will never
listen to these either, neither World Dolly Parton. We want
all the country legends listening. Ronnie millsap will never hear this.
(14:39):
Was okay, not with us though, because he doesn't listen
to stuff you should know and never will. So apparently
where where Artsy actually fell was pretty lucky because it
was in a very shallow crevasse and the fact that
that was uh kind of walled up on both sides
of him kept him. If he was just out in
(15:00):
the open, the freeze thought cycle over the years would
have washed everything away and ripped him apart. And uh,
it didn't happen because he kind of fell in this
crevasse um, all five ft two hundred and thirty four
pounds of him, which is a hundred and fifty eight
centimeters And that's right. He had brown eyes. Apparently at
(15:20):
five two was even a little short for the time,
but he was ripped. Yeah, he was pretty sturdy, uh,
you know, in his mid forties, like we said, and
really strong legs. And you know, kind of the fun
thing about this is the archaeological forensics of trying to
piece together like what was he doing, how did he die? What?
(15:43):
We'll get to all that, but just the fact that,
like he had big legs. They were like this guy,
he's probably go hurder. He's walking up and down these
mountains all the time. Look at those calves. He looked
like that guy from that one Liberty Mutual commercial. I
don't know, what do you mean, It doesn't matter, like
ten people this laft. What else did he had? He
had a dagger, he had that axe you're talking about.
(16:06):
The dagger, had a wicker sheath, he had um a backpack.
He had a leather pouch. Yeah. The backpack, by the way,
we'll never know how it worked because it got destroyed
by the people who went and dug him out of
the ice. He had some rudimentary snowshoes. He had a belt.
He had had a belt that matched his cape, right, yeah,
oh man, and we'll talk about that. But apparently they
(16:28):
think that was on purpose. Yes, that he was a
bit of a fashionista. Um. He had a couple of
like vessels that were lined with um maple leaves that
he used to carry embers from place to place so
he wouldn't have to start a fire again. And all
the stuff. You're like, I'm cool a flint dagger, cool
copper x oh some members, Yeah, I do too. But
(16:49):
I can see people out there being like, uh, talk
about math or something. Right. The thing is is like
all this stuff that seems kind of boring and superficial
has been so thoroughly study that it's actually been used
to paint a larger picture. Like we understand the copper
age in Europe way better than we did before he
was discovered just from finding this, the few things that
(17:12):
he died with and him himself. He also interestingly had
sixty one tattoos all over his body. I've been waiting
for this day. What you said tattoos correctly? Oh, you
mean the tattoos, so uh yeah, and they were they
(17:33):
covered him from head to toe in different parts, and
they didn't use needles back then obviously, but they would
rub or cut the skin open and then rub charcoal inside,
and they're all They mapped him out in two thousand
fifteen and organized them into nineteen groups, and they are basically,
you know, like maybe three identical lines, short lines like
(17:53):
an inch long, or like a cross, not a spiritual
religious cross, but you know, like a plus sign, yeah,
or like a Chinese character that has some inspirational association
perseverance or something had a lower back tattoo of a
thorny branch um. But yeah, they map these all out,
(18:15):
and for a while they thought, and some people still think,
because they were largely found around the joints and along
his back um, and he had back problems, and they
he basically was marked up where he hurt, it looks like,
and they thought it might have been either acuput puncture
points to mark or it might have been the acupuncture
(18:35):
treatment itself, right, but it does. They do think that
it had something to do with acupuncture, which in and
of itself was a big revelation because they thought up
to that point that acupuncture had been invented two thousand
years after, let see, and way further eastern in Asia, right,
But now they think that may not have been the
case because they found um a new cluster of tattoos
(18:59):
on his chest that they didn't formally recognize, and they
were like, there are no acupuncture points there, and he
didn't have any injuries there. So now they're they didn't
throw it out with the bathwater. But there are people
now they're saying like, we don't know if that's true
or not. No, Okay, so I'm really glad you said that.
Everything that we know about Letsie, aside from the fact
(19:20):
that he is dead, that we have a pretty good
idea of when he lived, probably was height, weight, was
stuff like that. Everything else is interpretation. So you have
to remember that interpretation super educated and usually UM displaying
the current understanding of history or interpretation of history or events,
(19:42):
but um, it is still interpretation. That's part of archaeology
and anthropology and history, especially when you're talking about prehistory.
This is he lived during a time before anybody wrote
anything down or recorded anything, which makes it prehistoric. But
you just bear that in mind that everything we're talking about,
and every a thing you go read about OTSI is
very much described in absolute terms, but it is our
(20:06):
picture and image of him. How he lived, how he
died has really shaped and shifted over the years since
he was discovered, and it still is. It's still malleable.
Nothing is definitive. Nothing said in ice. All right, let's
take a break. It was a bad joke. We'll talk
about Urtsey's health, right for this. Was he healthy? I
(20:49):
mean he was. No. He was a person of age
in his mid forties of a time where at that
age he's going to be pretty beat up. Yeah, he
wasn't unhealthy and like the modern sense where he's like
deliberately wrecking his health because he's eating too much junk
food or something like you know me. Yeah, but he
was unhealthy in the way that a person would be
(21:09):
unhealthy from living close to the land at a time
before medicine had really developed. Yeah, exactly, no doctors, no dentists.
So as you would imagine, he had gum disease, heart disease,
lime disease, gallbladder stones, hardened arteries, gall stones. Yeah, the
disorders so nice, we named it twice, right, He had
(21:31):
a whipworm parasite in his gut. He had h pylori
in his gut um. And all of this is to say,
like you said, he was probably a pretty normal dude
of mid forties of the time. Uh, he was. They
couldn't find his stomach for a long time. It's amazing
how much of the stuff like it was found over
the years, Like this tattoo. This new tattoo was just
(21:53):
found a few years ago after like many many years
of study. His birthmark that looks like Abraham Lincoln eluded
people for decades, but they couldn't even find his stomach
and they found it, like, oh, here it is twenty
years later. They found it wedged up between his ribs
and his lungs. Yeah. Then they found it because they
noticed tia gall stones. So they basically traced a path
(22:15):
from the gall bladder to the stomach and said, there
it is. We found it. And they were really happy
they found it because when they started dissected or take
samples from it, they found that it was full. Yeah.
He died like within an hour or so of eating
his last meal and hadn't digested it. He had food
in his in his colon. Uh, he had food and
his intestines. He had a turtle head peeking out. That's awesome.
(22:41):
What his last meal was dried ibex and deer meat
with ink horn wheat, Yes, and slow plums. I don't
know why that wasn't mentioned. Can get that same meal
in served you by a guy with a waxed mustache
and like some sort of arm band, an armed guard. So, yeah,
(23:02):
an armed guarter. That's that's it, isn't it. Yeah, that's it.
Um So he they think some sort of like fatty
cured meat, kind of like a bacon cured bacon today.
And the iron iron i corn wheat was from bread.
And he also ate slow plums. Got okay, slow plums Yeah,
that they make slow gin from. Oh really, which I've
(23:22):
never had, have you? That's s l o e right
yeah right. It's like it's supposedly a very tart, kind
of bitterish plum, but it was it's like load of vitamins.
I've never had it. I remember it seemed like an
old person drink was a slow gin fizz, like an
old person who's like a hundred fifty year olds old. Yes.
When when I lived in Arizona, there were all the
(23:43):
snowbirds are down there. They drink like slow gin fizz. Really,
I've never been present when somebody ordered a slow gim fizz. Yeah,
I would like to try one. Sure, try one. Okay, Josh,
get a couple of slogan fizzics. Make it a double.
I guarantee. There's a bar in this dumb building that
has lgent businessman. Sure, you know, with armed guards. Um,
(24:04):
can I keep? The armed guard comes with the drink.
So let's talk a little bit more about the copper Age.
I guess um he had, well, what we'll save his
injuries for a minute. Here, we'll talk a bit a
little about his lifestyle in the copper Age. Like you said,
he was, as demonstrated by his meals, he lived a
(24:26):
pretty like farming pleasant life down there, it seems like,
but not one without conflict, you know. Sure based on
his meals, well, based on his meals, he lived a
farming type lifestyle. But based on injuries we're going to
talk about it seems like that, you know, he he
had some enemies. So from from what I saw, and
(24:49):
I mean we used a lot of different articles, but
National Geographic is very well represented. And here live science
history dot Com the BBC. I came across something from
the Pen Pennsylvania, the Penn Museum or U Penn Museum.
I think they have a magazine called Expedition that was
pretty awesome. It had a pretty great thing, And I
(25:10):
saw a couple of things from um historians that wrote
up basically descriptions of let's see and thought co which
is this is a surprising great resource. Yeah have you
ever noticed Yes, yeah, so um in In one of these,
I saw that it was kind of put like he
he lived as a farmer and enjoyed like the fruits
(25:36):
of village life too, so things like cheese and processed
grains and cereals, so bread and stuff like that, and
the um the idea is that he didn't know how
to bake bread or make cheese. He he was part
of a villager or society where somebody knew how to
bake bread and somebody knew how to make changes, so
the professions were starting to emerge. But that he also
(25:58):
was pastoral and that like he he herded sheep and
that's probably what he did most of it most of
the time. And then he also lived very close to
the earth the land as well, like his last meal
was wild game ibex and deer and slow plums that
he probably plucked himself. So he was kind of like
(26:19):
this transitional human from from the hunter gatherer passed into
the agrarian, agriculture based future that spread out just ahead
of him. Yeah, Like just ahead of him were like
real deal Italians out there, bacon baguetts, well that's French, Yeah,
what I mean Italian bread? Yeah, yeah, in Italy they
(26:42):
just call it bread, that's right. Uh. They I mentioned
earlier that his clothes matched and they do think, and
of course again this is all speculation, but these garments
were pretty refined, even when you look at him now,
like he had these fur skin leggings that were held
up by spenders by Alexander McQueen. Oh man, I wouldn't
(27:04):
saw that. I know. That was amazing. So good. Um,
and a great documentary on him too, that's good and sad. Uh.
The they talk about the color of the animal skin, Zoe,
the contrasting colors, they think, we're actually matched, like elaborately,
and he had, like, like you said, a sense of style,
like you know, is that possible? Yeah, But I mean
(27:29):
it seems like a lot to extrapolate that his coat
and his belt matched, and so they were like, hey,
he had a real personal identity, whereas in it could
have been just like that's the materials that he had
on hand that fit. That's possible. But I think what
they're what they would assert is that um, it has
enough panache that the chances of it just being random
(27:51):
are very unlikely or less likely than it being you know,
asserting his sense of fashion and well and he was Italian,
that's right, So you know, Italians and their fashion go
hand in hand. Everyone who's been to Millino knows that.
Or Fenze. Remember when I was touring Europe as a youth,
my friend and I laughing at the Italian guys and
(28:14):
the hostels were like the nineteen year old dudes were
so put together and like would spend so much time
in the mirror wearing the cologne and getting their hair
just perfect, and we were just disgusting humans. And they
got the girls. So it turns out that they were
onto something a little bit of extraffer really does and
the big hair. Yeah, they were great guys. So we
(28:34):
met some cool Italian dudes. One of the other things too, though,
that the fact that he clearly was involved in a village.
They think that he was associated with a particular village
to the south, in a valley near you know, the mountains. Um.
It was things like bread and cheese that they think
they found in his body. Um, but also the fact
(28:56):
that he did not he obviously didn't know how to
make his own tools. Somebody else had. Um. He probably
did not know how to weave the cape he was wearing.
Somebody else had done that. Yeah, they're all they all
had their specialties that. Yeah, the tattoos, he couldn't have
put some of them on his own body. He probably
went to see a medical practition or to do that. So, Yeah,
(29:19):
this is at a point when specialists and and specialized
professions are starting to emerge. It's a really cool time. Yeah,
and this is these are the things that we've learned from,
you know, that we've gleaned from the stuff that we
found with him. I think it's just astoundingly fascinating. Yeah,
it's really cool. This is a really interesting period I
think of human development. It's also called, by the way, um,
(29:41):
the copper age or the chocolthic like copper age to
chalcolithic just kind of coughs out of the mouth in it. Yeah,
so let's talk a little bit about what might have
happened to see and how he found himself dead on
that mountain, because there quite a theories over the years,
(30:01):
and like you said, even this week they have some
more leads. But he was wounded. He had a really
bad wound on his right hand. They found out he
was right handed too, so this is a big deal
between his thumb and his forefinger there. That area went
all the way down to the bone. But it looked
like it had healed up a little bit. Um, So
it probably happened they said, within a few days of
(30:23):
when he died, but it was healing. But it was
a big injury, like we said, because he was right handed,
and um, but it's not the kind of thing that
that killed him, Like he didn't bleed out from that
or anything like that. No, So um, it makes you think,
well I did kill him then, right, Well, they think
that might have been from a fight. Perhaps that wound
that has been almost universally agreed upon from the outset
(30:48):
right that he probably didn't inflict that wound himself. That
it seems to have been a defensive wound. Right. There's
a guy named Alexander Horne, who is an inspector with
the Munich Police, and so we should give just a
little background for a second. When he was found, he
was taken into Germany down the mountain into Austria Innsbruck.
Austria and the Germans were heavily involved as well as
(31:09):
the Austrians and the Italians were less involved, and that's
where he kind of stayed for the first few years,
I think about a decade or less after he was discovered,
and then eventually it was transferred to Italy. The Italian side, yeah,
because they were like, he's a founder on our side. Yeah,
like just to barely I think. Also, I don't know
(31:29):
if this contributed to or if it came later, but
he does seem to have been linked to the Italian side,
where like you said, he was an Italian. So he
was transferred to Italy and when they when they took
custody of them man, they pulled out all the stops.
They put him up in Bolzano, Italy, near about I
think like thirty miles or something from where he was found. Uh.
(31:51):
They built a museum specifically for him, an institute built
around studying him, and they proceeded to study him more
than any other mummy has ever been studied, probably any
other body than has ever been studying in the history
of the world. Um and have just turned out paper
after paper after paper based on their findings from them.
(32:13):
Um so. But at first, some of the ideas that
we have about let's seeing what happened to him come
from the earliest interpretations posed by the Germans and the
Austrians when they had custody of its right, which weren't
necessarily right, as it turns out, no, but some may
have been. But my ultimate point was, everybody says from
(32:33):
the outset that the wound in his hand was a
defensive wound that came from close combat with somebody else.
That's right. For a while they thought there was an
Austrian archaeologist named Conrad Spindler that I mentioned earlier that
they sort of recreated the scene. And their contention early
on was like, man that acts is leaning up against
(32:54):
the rock, it's propped up there, like we think everything
is literally frozen in time from how it was is.
And I think that's one of the things that they've
later refuted, right, And they said that it looks like
things might have moved around something. Yeah, they think that
the um what would you call it, the site I
guess from the freeze thaw cycle just kind of distributed,
(33:15):
redistributed this stuff. Yeah, which you know, it's still all valid,
but it not necessarily it was not necessarily exactly as
it was at his moment of death. Um. They did
find his hat though, off of his head, as if
it just like kind of fell off of his head,
which might have been true. Right, So some of those
early stuff. They also found what they thought were fractured
(33:37):
ribs that had not healed. Right, So the earliest picture
was this like they treated it like this is a
dead body mystery. Where did this dead body come from?
How did he die? Yeah? But well quickly though, they
also found pollen in his gut that they thought came
from an autumn plant, So they were like, he died
in the fall, right. Okay, so that's the full setup
(33:57):
of the bad information. So the first idea, and I
think it was Spindler who came up with the disaster theory,
wasn't Conrad. Spindler said, Okay, here's what happened to Let's see,
he came down from the mountain, probably hurting some sheep
or goats, went down to his village, uh, and got
(34:19):
in an altercation with somebody cut his hand. You're looking
at my wife, right, that kind of thing. That's nice, um,
and he fled or oh and part part of the
altercation also resulted in some cracked ribs and either fled
or left escaped up the mountain again where he became
exhausted from his cracked ribs and his cut hand, and
(34:43):
uh he laid down or fell into this little shallow
crevasse and died of exposure to hypothermia. That was the
disaster theory. And that was that, you know, I mean
they had that for a few years, and somebody came
along and said, I don't think that's right. That's right, um,
because they found out some of the things, like the
site had melted some and then things were in different
(35:06):
positions they originally thought. Probably they examined the ribs again
and said they were actually not fractured before he died. Yeah,
that they were just a little bent. Yeah from like
after his death, probably from the push of ice, the
pressure from ice fusing on him again exactly. That'll that'll
crack your ribs in a second or bend your ribs.
The big one, though, was what they found in the
(35:27):
X ray in two thousand one, Right, you know what
they found? Should we take a break, all right, we'll
discover what they found right after this? What do they find, Chuck?
(35:56):
They found a freaking arrow head lodged in his shoulder,
back shoulder. That was a verbatim quote from the press conference.
This was a big deal. They missed it for ten years,
they missed the thing, and they found it. Uh yeah,
it was just a regular X ray And they said,
wait a minute, that looks denser than bone. What is that.
(36:19):
It's a triangle. It's a triangle. And it was a
thirteen millimeter gash along a major artery in his chest.
And they're like, he bled to death up there. Yeah,
they said, there's no way he would have survived. This
is unhealed. This this is finally what killed him. So
this disaster theory that he got in an altercation but
ultimately died of exposure hypothermia UM was replaced by the
(36:42):
murder theory, which is very similar, but there's some important
nuances in differences. One, so the cracked rib thing, just
throw that away. It was a red herring UM. But
the altercation is still the same. He comes down the mountain,
he gets in a fight of some sort, go back
up the mountain with his cut hand, and while he's
(37:04):
hanging out, maybe tending to his wound, maybe trying to
figure out what to do next. That's my arrow impression
message for you. So yeah, right in the back, in
the back. From a distance, they think due to the
penetration from the arrowhead from about thirty that is it
(37:24):
is a good shot. Because it was a kill shot
from thirty and fifty ft. That's a that's a ways, um.
I can't quite put it into an easy analogy, but
that's a long that's a long way. Um. And the
fact that it was in the back, he never saw
it coming and it would have killed him pretty quickly
was a punk move, is what it was. It was.
Here's the thing. Because his possessions were left intact um
(37:49):
and because he had that defensive wound, they think that
this was the result of his death, as murder was
the result of a personal conflict. There was no theft
involved or anything like that, because his copper acts alone
would have been pretty valuable at the time that somebody
would have taken it had they killed him for something
like robbery. Yeah, so this was a vendetta, yes, or
(38:11):
at least a personal fight that happened that day, yeah,
or maybe a long standing for you. There's no way
to tell here. Here we reached the point where the
historians and the archaeologists are like, we really can't say,
but here's some ideas for me. It's either the person
who he fought came back for revenge. I think, and
(38:31):
this is a total guest, but I was trained in history,
so I'm allowed to do this. He was trained in history, Yeah,
it was. I studied history in college. That's what they
call it. They're like, just how you do it? Train
history camp? Right? Um? He he was successful in that
hand to hand combat and killed the other person. Whether
it was offensive or defensive. I like to think it
(38:54):
was defensive. He didn't have a choice. Um. But the
person's family came back and killed him up on the mountain. Gotcha.
That's the current idea. Well, not that last part that
it was his family, but what I said leading up
to that, everything about that, um, everything else about that.
I'm really sorry, Chris Christopherson. Um, that's the current idea
(39:15):
of what happened. Let I think so you're not going
with my jealous lover theory. No, okay, no, I'm not
all right. I think it was a woman with that arrow.
You think the woman a woman shot him. Yeah, jealous lover.
I think he was stepping out and he was like
holding up his hands like baby, baby, it wouldn't me.
And she slices him with the her implement of choice
(39:39):
and then dices him with the arrow. And then he's like,
this is getting too serious. You're crazy, and so he
heads up the mountains and she's like, I'll show you crazy.
She turns into close, she goes and forges an arrow,
and then in that time it took her to forage
that arrow from hardened molten you know, l flint hirt shirt.
(40:03):
He's up that hill a little bit and she's like,
no problem, watch this right in the back. I like
that one too. Alright. I'm going with family, family, because
I mean, you know the rule, can't trust family, trust family.
So um, speaking of that churt, uh, he did not
have um, he didn't have blanks. Yeah, so this is
(40:27):
evidence that he didn't know how to create his own tools.
Somebody applicate these tools, which apparently were sort of on
their last legs. Yeah, that was another thing too, So
he did not have what he needed. Like imagine if
you had um, if you had like a a tool
an no, a knife, okay, and it's made of flint,
(40:49):
and you use it over and over and over again,
it's gonna get worn down and eventually it's gonna get
so worn down that you just can't use it anymore.
This is essentially the state of his arrowheads and his
knife and some of his others, his stone tools in particular,
that he was not in a position to defend himself
with his own tools because he'd used them up. And
(41:10):
I wonder if the if he's not making these in
the village, if they're like ertsies, you know he's have
you guys noticed he's on the way out, Like, we're
not gonna be making any more tools for Ertsie. Yeah,
I can think we don't have many. He'll just make
do with what he's got, it said, but he owes
me money, So should we talk about moss. This was
(41:33):
astounding to me that this happened in the last few days,
because did you pick this out before this happened or
was it serendifically? This is what I saw that made
me say it's time, Okay, I got you. So researchers
found uh these moth spores uh that were inside of him,
that he had ingested and just on him and around him. Um,
(41:53):
seventy percent of the seventy five species of these mosses
and liverwarts were not local. And they basically said, there's
no way these would have been on the side of
the mountain if not for him, right like a bird
couldn't have transported it this far or something like that, like,
let's he brought these up here. And so in doing
that and in tracing like these mosses and spores and everything,
(42:16):
they have a big clue. They've been able to retrace
his steps that last basically thirty three hours of his life,
the last day and a half, and it was not
a great day and a half for him. He had
his hand wound. By now by the time we're coming
in here, he's already got his hand wound. Uh. It's
got to be smarting. And it's a real problem for
him too, because even if he could make tools, he
(42:38):
would have been really troubled to do anything because he
was right handed, and that's where his wound almost down
to the bone was was in his right hand, so
that's a big problem for him right there. Yeah, So
what they found in is lower colon, which is would
have been the last I'm sorry, the oldest stuff that
he had eaten that has not yet been the turtle
(42:59):
head not yet, not turtle headed yet or I guess
currently turtle headed. Um, we're pine and spruce pollen, so
they said, And it's kind of neat. That's what I
love about this, like historical forensics, like, oh, well, we
know what was in his body, and we know where
that stuff is. It's not at certain altitudes. It was
a high altitude for us around feet and they know
(43:23):
because of where it was in his body. This is
thirty three hours before he died. But the middle tractor
was colon. That's where all the secrets are. In the colon,
you know, had pollen from hop hornbeam and that's stuff
from lower altitudes. It's from lower altitude. But also it
grows only in the spring and summer. It decays very quickly,
(43:47):
so it's not something that you would preserve and keep
for the fall or the winter. Throw out the autumn theory.
So they say he definitely died in the summer, right
and I guess that means that he probably descended maybe
all the way to the bottom of the valley within
twelve hours, maybe nine to twelve hours of his death,
(44:07):
and then all the way back up again right where
he was found dead. And they figured all this out.
They retraced all this just from those spores and mosses.
They think, maybe so he he's down in the valley
to begin with, or in the village, gets that hand wound,
flees up to the tree line. Um, and then they think,
because he's like the little lady always needs a few
days to cool off, right, Oh, you're gonna get some
(44:30):
email for that one. Um. I retract my right by
the way. Uh so, and then he goes back down,
they think to get some mosses because they have anni
bacterial properties. Yeah, you can also raped meat in it
apparently too, I guess keep it or whatever. But also
they may he may have wrapped his hand in it
or something as well, or maybe maybe then he goes
(44:52):
back up to the tree too, above the tree line
where he dies at about ten feet along the way.
He had that last meal of I box and deer
and bread and slow plums. Pretty good meal, not bad.
I wonder if he was panicked, if he knew like,
I'm in a bad way because of this cut on
(45:12):
my hand, and my tools and arrowheads are not in
good shape. I don't know, because it's interesting you only
know that stuff from seeing it at that point in history,
Like it would have been like, boy, I've seen that
kind of wounded before on too, and he did not
last long. But if you thought somebody was coming after you,
and you knew that your arrowhead was useless and your
(45:35):
knife was like dull and you're your stab in hand
was cut to the bone, you probably wouldn't have had
to have seen that before to be like, uh, probably
so well, he was in full retreat from what it
looks like, right, Yeah, and that's why he was going
up that mountain. That's that's that's what most people guess. Yeah,
so he was probably scared, yeah, which is sad, But
(45:55):
that's how we spent this last day and a half
kind of on the run up and down the mountain,
which is pretty impressive that he was able to make.
You know, he went up and down the mountain. Don't
forget he was wearing moccas and stuff with grass and
he was old for the time and he had gingervitis. Uh.
Kind of a neat thing is they have found, um,
they found some weird markers on his male sex chromosomes
(46:17):
and they've actually traced some genetic relatives at least nineteen
people living today, Yeah in Austria, not married but related
to Yeah. Pretty neat. Yeah, I think so too. So check.
There's another theory that says, hey, you know, your whole
murder theory it's bs. Maybe the murder part is correct,
but he was murdered ritually. This is an a vendetta
(46:39):
or anything like that. Let's see was buried, right, they
think that this was a ritual burial on top of
a mountain. Um, but he you know, it's not the
kind of Maybe they just want a group that removed
the organs and did that stuff, right. Yeah, So the
premise of the burial theory, called the social theory, is
(47:00):
that he's not a snapshot of everyday life. That they
didn't that he would have been so heavily laden with
all of this stuff because we didn't even say he
he had a bow and arrow, over knife, a hatchet. Um,
he was wearing moccasins with grass and they're kind of
like seriously, that's the best they could do at this
time for the hiking a mountain. That's the shoes you wore, Like,
those aren't mountain hiking shoes at any point in history. Um.
(47:24):
And the fact that um, the shaft of the arrow
was removed, I think they point to is an example
of the idea that he was um buried, that he
was killed ritually and buried in this So they think
the killing was a ritual killing too, because sacrificial killing. Yeah, oh,
(47:46):
I didn't get that part. And the other thing is
they're saying, like this stuff, these fancy Alexander McQueen leggings
that he wore that were basically the predecessor of later hosen,
there's some pretty nice stuff for a simple like sheep
herd her is it to be wearing? That's what this
is what the social theory people are saying. They're they're like,
we think this guy was actually kind of important and
(48:08):
that he was buried here um as a sign a symbol.
And what they found or what they point to, is
that there's stella like monoliths that were carved in the
late coper Age a thousand or two thousand years after
Utsie because he was born at the beginning of the
coper age that our depictions of somebody dressed a lot
(48:30):
like Utsie and they think that these are like heroes
and legends, ancestors, and they're saying, this guy's wearing what
these people were carving images of a thousand years later,
maybe he was kind of important, and maybe this has
also had some ornamentation too, didn't he Yeah, like a
marble bead, which you know could mean something or could not.
But the fact that he had so much stuff with
(48:51):
him does kind of support the idea that maybe it
was a burial and then to send him into the
afterlife with all the things he would need exactly. And
then the other one is no one's ever explained how
he was so well preserved. That apparently being frozen by
ice doesn't doesn't cut it. Yeah, that that other people
have been found who died far later and we're in
(49:15):
way worse states of decay than as he was, but
they found no like chemical preservation evidence or anything. No,
And admittedly at both sides, if if either one of
them are being honest, they will say we don't know
how he was this well preserved. Quite a mystery still
to this day. As much as we know about him,
he is still a mystery. He's our love and mystery man.
(49:38):
That's right. If you want to know more about let's see.
Go type O t Z I and your favorite search
bar and it will bring up some fascinating stuff. And
since I said that son for listener man, I'm gonna
call this the Accidental iron Man. Hey, guys, a big
fan for a long time. I accidentally did my first
(49:58):
iron Man in July. And you might think, how in
the world would that happen? I was thinking exactly. Then
here's how that happens. I've been doing triathlons since two
thousand fifteen always planned on doing an iron Man at
one point or at some point, my plan was to
do a half iron manen do the full thing. In
twenty nineteen, I wanted to do the Iron Man like Placids,
(50:20):
since it's reasonably close and as a lake swim as
opposed to a river or in ocean swim. Um. That's
a hard race to get into, though, because it sells
out so fast. I got an email tell me registration
was open, and in my excitement I misread it and
thought it was for the half, so I signed up
and realized after the fact that it was the entire
hundred and forty point six race and not the seventy
(50:42):
point three Triathlons don't do refunds, so I paid my
eight hundred dollar plus entry fee and couldn't get it back.
I could have deferred for a year, but it's decided
just to go for it. And I finished the race
in fifteen hours, two minutes and forty three seconds. And
that is from John Patanyac and an email John back,
and it's like, you want to give me a couple
(51:03):
of little tidbits here for listener mail, and he said sure,
and he wrote back and he said, one thing I
can say is it really takes over your personal life.
At my peak, I was training twenty hours a week.
And he said that is literally just pool, bike or running.
He said, doesn't count travel to and from the gym,
cooking meals, prepping equipment. He said, it's literally like a
part time job. And he said the race was a
(51:25):
lot of fun. He said, the Lake Placid course goes
through the old Olympic structures from the nineteen Olympics, and uh,
you finish at the finish line and the speed skating
oval that's Nate. Yeah, it's pretty cool a sineficture. It's
like urban exploration iron right, uh, And he said. One
of the cool things they do if you're first timer,
as you wear an orange wristband, so all the volunteers
(51:46):
and crowd will give you extra support and it says
I will become one on it. And he said, it
really works. And he said, and finally at the end,
the race is so meaningful to so many people. Everyone
has their own story, but almost nothing is better at
for a year of training then hearing you are iron Man.
When he crossed the finish line, it's awesome. They have
(52:07):
Auzzie singing it. I would, I would? Who else? I
don't know. I guess Deo could. Again. That is John
Patoniac Dio is dead, oh is he? Yeah? Ronnie James
Dio has passed on since when within the last couple
of years. Yeah. One of the coolest tattoos have ever seen.
Somebody got like on their arm, their forearms. I've seen that,
(52:31):
so that when they make like the devil horns or whatever,
it's Ronnie Dio making the devil horns and the person's
fingers his arm becomes Yeah, it's really neat it. I
saw that and I thought, man, that's the coolest tattoo
ever seen. I think it might be. It's pretty Hats
off to Chris Christofferson's manager, who actually is the person
(52:52):
with that? That's right? Uh. If you want to get
in touch with us, like who is that John Patoniac?
Thanks John? If you want to get touch of this,
like John, congratulations too. You can go onto Stuff you
Should Know and check out our social links. You can
also send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeart
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
(53:14):
of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
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